Blog · since 2007 · 156 posts
The last day of the Open Source Systems conference was dedicated to two workshops - one on free / libre and open source software (FLOSS) in education, and the other to the same in the mobile sector - denoted 'mFOSS'. Led by Tony Wasserman, a…
Jean-Paul van Belle Jean-Paul outlined a number of barriers to the adoption of open educational resources (OERs) in Africa, and the body of research he and his team had done to validate this. They concluded that; - Technology - Internet access is still an issue…
Carol Smith opened her keynote talk by providing a brief history of her life with Google; she started as a journalism graduate, and now runs the Google Open Source Programs office, which oversees all open source code used internally at Google, ensuring compliance with the…
Mark Gayer opened his keynote by stating that it was unusual for Microsoft to be at an open source conference; he then went through a number of slides outlining how Microsoft is engaging with the open source community. Mark's job is to travel the world…
Simon Phipps opened the keynote by explaining how Richard Stallman got sick of vendors not making source code available. By the end of the 1990s, there was a crisis. The web was emerging as a force for tremendous change in the topology of how information…
Michael 'Monty' Widenius started the keynote by providing a brief history of MySQL and MariaDB. The MySQL code was released in December 1995 under a dual licensing model. Oracle bought the related InnoDB engine in 2005, and MySQL Ab was sold to Sun in March…
Day 2 of the Open Source Systems conference started with a Women in Open Source Breakfast, organised by the lovely Tehri Kilamo (https://twitter.com/terhikilamo). The conversations centred around the role of women and representation of women in technology, engineering and open source in general in the…
For Day 1 of Open Source Systems, I chose to attend the business networking stream rather than the research-oriented Doctoral Consortium, and got to learn more about a number of different companies and their products. Gurux Gurux is a Finnish company, who use open source…
The second day in Tunisia started at 0630 - by which time it was already 30 degrees and about 95% humidity! The long-ingrained Australian habit of carrying water with you wherever you go definitely served me well :-) Getting out early meant that the souk…
As with every journey, this one began with a small step. From the Gull Bus to Melbourne Airport (MEL) I boarded a flight to Dubai (DXB) - and rested peacefully on the plane. DXB was beautiful - and there was even a miniature lake in…